In a commercial retail establishment, an indoor positioning system may be based on RF, visible light, or acoustic beacons. The location of a user' device equipped with a suitable sensor or multiple sensors (e.g., a device) can be computed from the signals received from one or more anchor node beacons, or beacons, for short. Beacons may be of one or multiple types. The information captured from the beacons may include beacon signal strength, image of the beacon, and the data-code emitted by the beacon. The location computation is based on the beacon information captured at a given location and matched with the prior information about the indoor space. This prior information includes the map of the indoor space, the location of the beacons in the space along with the beacon codes for each of the beacons.
If the beacon codes remain constant, there is an opportunity for others to build applications that use the same beacon infrastructure. All that would be required is to survey the space, produce a map or have map provided by a map provider, locate the beacons and use the same beacon data that is emitted from each of the beacons. The ownership of such an indoor positioning system could not be preserved.